December 17, 2011
It had seemed a simple enough wheeze. Give banks unlimited access to 3-year funding from the European Central Bank and it wouldn’t take much more than a nudge and a wink for them to buy the bonds of Europe’s troubled peripheral countries instead of having the ECB do the job itself. For those too dull to read between the lines, Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, spelled it out: “each state can turn to its banks, which will have liquidity at their disposal.”
The wheeze, however, seems to have been too clever by half. Hours after Mr Sarkozy was urging banks to bail out governments, the European Banking Authority (EBA) released the results of its updated stress tests showing that European banks need to raise €115 billion ($149 billion) in extra capital, mainly to offset a fall in the value of their existing holdings of government bonds issued by troubled peripheral European countries.
The banks with the biggest capital shortfalls are those from Spain, Greece and Italy. Several may have to tap government bail-out funds to raise the capital, creating the circular prospect of governments bailing out their banks that are in turn supposed to bail out the government. Italian banks, for instance, will need €15 billion in additional capital; among them is UniCredit, Italy’s biggest bank by assets, which holds some €40 billion in Italian government debt and needs to raise almost €8 billion in capital. Spanish banks need €26 billion. Europe’s core has not been spared either. Banks in Germany, the euro area’s biggest creditor country, need additional capital and Commerzbank, Germany’s second-largest bank, may also find itself asking for government help to fill a €5.3 billion hole in its balance-sheet.
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